most popular liquors. It is made by fermentation of rye, wheat, potatoes, grapes, or sugar beet molasses. Alcoholic content usually ranges between 35 and 50 percent by volume. The standard Russian vodka is 40 percent alcohol by volume (80 alcoholic proof). The exact origins of vodka cannot be traced definitively, but almost certainly vodka as a beverage comes from 14th–15th-century Eastern Europe. Russia is often named the birthplace of vodka. The distillation apparatus was known in Moscow from the late 14th century and was used to produce spirit, the precursor of vodka. According to Russian food historian William Pokhlyobkin, the first original recipe of Russian vodka was produced around 1430 by a monk called Isidore from Chudov Monastery inside the Moscow Kremlin. Early 16th century Kokoshnik (architecture) The kokoshnik is a semicircular or keel-like exterior decorative element in the traditional Russian architecture, a type of corbel blind arch. The name was inspired by the traditional Russian women's head-dress. Kokoshniks were used in Russian church architecture in the 16th century, while in the 17th century their popularity reached the highest point. Kokoshniks were placed on walls, at the basement of tented roofs or tholobates, or over the window frames, or in rows above the vaults. 1510s Tented roof masonry The tented roof masonry was a technique widely used in the Russian architecture in the 16th and 17th centuries. Before that time tented roofs (conical, or actually polygonal roofs) were made of wood and used in the wooden churches. These hipped roofs are thought to have originated in the Russian North, as they prevented snow from piling up on wooden buildings during long winters. Wooden tents also were used to cover towers in kremlins, or even applied in some common buildings, like it was in Western Europe, but the thin, pointed, nearly conical roofs of the similar shape made of brick or stone became a unique form in Russian church architecture. Some scholars, however, argue that hipped roofs have something in common with European Gothic spires, and even tend to call this style 'Russian Gothic'. The Ascension church of Kolomenskoye, built in 1532 to commemorate the birth of the first Russian Tsar Ivan IV, is often considered the first tented roof church, but recent studies show that the earliest use of the stone tented roof was in the Trinity Church in Alexandrov, built in the 1510s. 1530 Middle Muscovite Tsardom of Russia